THE ZEN GUN

Winner of the Japanese SEIUN Award, 1985 DAW Books, 1983, cover art Kelly Freas Laffont, 1984 (France) as "Le Rayon Zen" Methuen, UK. Jalava, 1987 (Finland) as "Zen-Ase"

A novel about:

The absolutely ultimate weapon that can ever exist...
The sub-human who found it and tried to use it...
The beasts who manned humanity's last star fleet...
The widening rip in the space-time continuum...
The brief cosmic empire of the pigs...
The theory of gravitational recession...
The super-samurai who served the zen-gunner...
The colonial girl who defied the galactic empire...
And many more 'nova' ideas from the author of whom Michael Moorcock said, "There is no one else to match him."

"His work is the very antithesis of tired hackdom. To invent an entire self-consistent cosmology and physics for a $2.50 DAW paperback (THE ZEN GUN, 1983) is one of those noble acts of selfless altruism that keep SF alive. There seems no limit to the man's inventiveness, his pyrotechnic bursts of fresh ideas. To these natural gifts, enough to sustain a dozen lesser writers, he adds an intense dedication to craft that gives his best work its eerie sense of dark complexity." - Bruce Sterling, Cheap Truth

"..endlessly inventive ... so offbeat in its approach to plotting and setting that [it has] attracted considerable critical attention." - Don D'Ammassa

"..the continual flow of crazy ideas threatens to get in the way of the plot." - David Pringle.

"..if you take seriously the premisses of THE ZEN GUN .. you may find yourself refreshed, inspired, at ease with the flesh, amazed at the world's weirdness but erotically attracted to it rather than disgusted and repelled." - SEMIOTEXTE (SF)

"Of Bayley's later novels, The Zen Gun is the most bizarre and enjoyable. So many ideas are played off against each other that there is hardly any room for the reader to breathe. [...] ..disdain for multiple ideas and simultaneous narrative is purely an English phenomenon, a misapplication of Occam's Razor. If Bayley were Brazilian or Polish, we would all be reading him." - Rhys Hughes

Barrington Bayley: "I'll explain about Volsted Magroom, the fantasy writer in THE ZEN GUN. One of my minor heroes is John Russell Fearn, an English sf hack who at one time wrote extensively for the pulps and later for a flourishing British paperback industry as Vargo Statten. Later Fearn's publisher, Scion, brought out some titles under the pen names (if I recall correctly) Volsted Gridban and Vector Magroom. Volsted Magroom is a conflation of these two."